Dept. of Energy’s Prediction About Coal

The U.S. Energy Information Administration, a part of the Department of Energy responsible for the collection and analysis of energy information, delivered some amazing news to the coal industry Tuesday.

“Coal-fired power plants are expected to be the leading source of U.S. electricity for the next two years, as the cost of coal is expected to rise by less than the cost of natural gas and renewable generation continues to grow,” announced EIA acting administrator Howard Gruenspecht, according to the Washington Examiner.

Because of “higher coal exports and more coal-fired electricity generation,” domestic coal production is experiencing a “boost,” he added.

In fact, while coal-produced energy made up 30 percent of the nation’s total electricity output last year, it’s expected to make up 32 percent in the second half of the year.

The left hates coal. Then again the left hates gas, oil, and anything else that is good.

Ironmike4610

I believe the left even hates themselves but are too brainwashed to admit it.

gvette

I think you’re correct. I was reading this AM, that as of today they are blaming the guy that ran his car into the crowd because he was a Trump supporter. Two days earlier, it was said, wait, I’ll give you the quote.

A man said to have harbored Nazi sympathies as a teenager before a failed bid to join the U.S. Army was due in court on Monday to face charges he plowed his car into protesters opposing a white nationalist rally in Virginia, killing a woman and injuring 19.

Frank B.

No but we sure as hell hate racist bastards like YOU!

Victoria Gray

They like spending our money thats why they like wind Farms-(Subsidies) Solor Panels not made in the USA

gvette

When you look, which I have, a lot of the wind farms are doing nothing, broken, and in disrepair. LOL..kind of like the DemonRAT party is.

What’s funny about that is, it’s the left promoting the useless wind, and solar. Put the blame where is goes. Remember, your boy Barry was behind this. Remember his pet Solyndra? Here, educate yourself.
This is a long list of Barry’s fails!

The complete list of faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies:

Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*

SpectraWatt ($500,000)*

Solyndra ($535 million)*

Beacon Power ($43 million)*

Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)

SunPower ($1.2 billion)

First Solar ($1.46 billion)

Babcock and Brown ($178 million)

EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*

Amonix ($5.9 million)

Fisker Automotive ($529 million)

Abound Solar ($400 million)*

A123 Systems ($279 million)*

Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*

Johnson Controls ($299 million)

Brightsource ($1.6 billion)

ECOtality ($126.2 million)

Raser Technologies ($33 million)*

Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*

Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*

Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*

Range Fuels ($80 million)*

Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*

Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*

Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*

GreenVolts ($500,000)

Vestas ($50 million)

LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)

Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*

Navistar ($39 million)

Satcon ($3 million)*

Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*

Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)

*Denotes companies that have filed for bankruptcy.

apzzyk

It is not the cost of the product that really makes any difference, it is the cost of trnasportation. BNSF is replacing rails through my town, because the weight of the cars on the tracks wears our the tracks. But with pipelines carrying just natural gas, once the pipeline is laid, the usual mainentence only consists of replacing valves and other items that wear out. The Ludlow coal mine disaster and masecre happened in S. Colorado, and near Superior there has been an abandoned coal mine burning for over 40 years, and this strip of coal goes all the way up to at least Montana, but all of the populated places over this seam have relied on natural gas for primary heating use for about 70 years. My neighbors house has a window in the basement leading to a coal room, but there has not been a delivery for at least 65 years. Xcell, the natural gas and sometimes electric company only charges for their cost of the natural gas, and the use of their piplines to get it to our homes. They could give away the coal, but the cost of transportation and home delivery would make the cost of the delivered coal product much more expensive than the alternative.

daniel wright

Now you seem to limit your thinking to your state. Here in Ca. we have used natural gas for heating ever since I can remember (1954). The eastern states like NY NJ and Penn. are still using coal in many homes and most appt. buildings use coal to generate steam for their radiators. As it would cost untold billions to refurbish those buildings it would be best to leave it alone until absolutely necessary.

apzzyk

The reason why homes and business in S. CA use natural gas is because of El Paso Natural Gas – which is a pipeline or transportation company now a part of BNSF which was the sole supplier of Natural Gas until after the Oil Embargo of the 1970’s when the OPEC countries began the LNG ships, which used the LNG ships to bring natural gas to newly built LNG facilities to the port cities at a lower rate than could be charged by ENG. During the embargo ENG had contrated with its producers to buy Natural gas from them at about $12.00 per million cubic feet (natural gas accounting corrects for well head pressure and altitude) but with OPEC brining it to S. CA and selling it at $2.50 MM cu feet, ENG got into big financial problems. I went to work there to provide the analysis of their data which showed that they had done their best to meet the terms of the contracts – they had just lost the first of many and were ordered to pay about $1 Billion to the producers, with many more suits in waiting. They had screwed up big time by making the assumption that the Embargo would last forever, so they contracted to buy way too much NG – this was not the first time that a private enterprise had made an erroneous assumption, which put the government in the position of having to bail it out because of ‘National Defense’ – if ENG went broke, and the supplies that were coming from OPEC stopped S. CA would go under. Congress passed the ‘Pay or Take’ bill which got ENG off the hook, but allowed the producers to use the pipelines for free and make their own deal with the local gas transmission companies or utilities.
With Coal in the NE. It was only a viable industry for so long as there was large demand by the steel industries in the rust belt, with local use just being a very minor part of their revenue, so as the rust belt started to fail, so did the coal mines, and by this time natural gas pipelines from TX and LA were reaching the major population centers, and with that the cost of conversion was quickly absorbed by the users. A coal fired furnace requires 24/7 labor to make sure that the fuel needed gets into the the place where it is burned where natural gas does not require this constant work force, so even the taking to the natural gas from the main pipeline to where it will be used was quickly repaid, and the same went for taking the pipelines up through the places such as Scranton which had been a mining town. In my town, until about 1950, because of the local mines, most homes, businesses and schools used coal. The conversion kits for making a formerly coal fired furnace were actually not that expensive, and also was less labor intensive and more reliable. With NG you could leave your home at 7 am, and return to find it at the same temperature when you got home at 6 pm, where with coal, very frequently, you would return and have to relight the furnace, or if you were gone long enough you would return to a totally cold house which might have frozen pipes which did not happen with NG which could also be themostaicly controlled. The last of these converted furnaces was removed and replaced in the house next door about 5 years ago. It had been a rental, and because it tried to use the old chiminey, the pilot light on the furnace had blown out, the pipes had frozen, and since it was a rental that was only checked by the own weekly it cost him a bunch to make the place livable again. Now rented by a man and his wife and he is in the heating and AC business.
The bottom line is that conservativism eventually fails simply because it keeps using models that either have already failed elsewhere or does not have the capacity to adapt to change. Kodak held many of the patents on the digital cameras, but stuck to film technology and just sold its patent rights for so long that when it tried to enter the new market that there was no room. DeVos wants to lead the Dept of ED back to the good old days of private schools without probably even knowing why we had to move to public schools in the first place. Private schools were and some still are very good educational places, but have their limits when it come to either the applied sciences – Engineering – and really bad problems when it comes to the pure sciences, and what else is happening in the name of conservatism is the lack of federal funding for the pure sciences. Industry cannot afford to make real advances because there will not be enough profit even if they do make break throughs, because of the limited lifetime of patents and copyrights. What we have seen over about the past 35 years of the ideological version of pure capitalism and assumptions that if they were ever valid, they are no longer. One of my ancestors began the steel industry in England, at about the same time as Wm. Penn was convicted of Heracy and sentenced to transportation with a land grant from the King to what is now PA, all because of the Conservative religious believes of the English that valued faith over reason, and now we are going back to the same place – the funding to the EPA has been cut so that the data it would have reported on global warming will not be reported, and the same with the USDA. These are almost total replications of the failures of Agriculture in the USSR, where the minister of Agriclure though that he could grow citrus near Moskow where the market was. There are places in the US that tried the same thing, but on a smaller scale. When I lived in NC I lived on Orange Grove Road, which had no more orange grove. My neighbors who had a green house actually had a producing orange tree, but with the green house, there was the monthly raid on what the authorities continued to think was a pot growing operation. Owned by a Retired English Prof from UNC – a very liberal university in a sea of red necks. At the time largely known for its Med school, and they did not teach a liveral or conservative version of Anatomy or other of the medical sciences. Now it will not cooperate with the reactionary laws on rest rooms on transgenders, so are getting even less state, and soon to be federal funding. How many people will die because reasearch did not get done in time at UNC-CH?

daniel wright

You’re entire argument is Bullshit. I live in N ca. and my utility is PG&E. Try again.

apzzyk

Where does PG&E get the NG that it distributes? CA has almost no existing NG production capacity. When I was in the USMC and going to LA, thee were NG storage tanks S of LA with floating tops that would go up and down depending on how much was being delivered and how much was being used. These were the terminals where gas collected by ENG was delivered to the local distribution systems such as PG&E, and I think that almost the entire distribution system in CA has been taken over by PG&E. In most cities as well as on U campuses, there is a central heating plant, which produces steam which is taken to the individual buildings for internal distribution, and this means that the basements and sub-basements of the tall buildings can be used for other purposes, and eliminates the need for above ground delivery of such things as coal in the CBD – ever seen a picture showing a coal delivery truck in any modern CBD. Steam grates are places where the homeless camp out in cold weather, and this system also avoids the danger of using high pressure NG to heat each individual building. CO has been both the beneficiary and the victim of the fossil fuel boom and bust cycle, but by diversification, the Denver metro area has done nothing but increase in population. Longmont, where I have lived in the same home since 1946, has gone from a small town of 5,000 in 1950, to a city of over 100,000 now with an expected increase in residents of about 5,000 over the next couple of years. No room for starter homes any more because of the lack of water – this year we had almost 200% of average snow pack, so the irrigation reservoirs are still full waiting to see what the snow pack will be this winter. There are currently under construction over 1,000 apartment units under construction, but no new detached single family housing units except for the very large ones. I think that it was in San Bruno that PG&E did not maintain its delivery lines properly and the explosion killed something like 7, in Firestone, CO, just a couple of months 2 guys were killed when a house they were working on that happened to be full of raw natural gas (no smell added) exploded – leaking abandoned dead head line. The NG system is very complicated, because of geology. Some NG that is being produced in CO and WY is being taken to a compression station where it is turned into LNG and loaded aboard ships to be taken to where it can be sold for the most, and the same along the gulf coast. The LNG terminals have to be at least a mile off shore for safety reasons

daniel wright

So now you’re OK with pipelines? Be careful,you may turn conservative in your old age.

Pamela H

Another of BARRYHUSSEIN’s “Fuck America” moves dies in President Trumps dust to MAGA!!!!!!

generalJed

The more the left complains about climate change and coal, the more I would mine, ship, and burn to make reliable electricity! In your face, communists!

John R Fleming

coal emissions can be cleaned now. We have it- we should use it or sell it

keedon

Coal emissions were cleaned in the 70s by EPA mandated scrubbers on the stacks. Now the coal is also turned into dust so it burns cleaner and hotter.

The Deplorable Hobbit

When particulates, sulfur, NOX, and Mercury didn’t work the left finally settled on CO2 as the emission that could kill coal.

daniel wright

Except that CO2 is a necessary plant nutrient. That is something the forgot so they just ignore that fact and call it a pollutant.

The Deplorable Hobbit

If they would all voluntarily stop breathing it would resolve a myriad of issues. CO2 is a trace gas and not as big a potential problem as some other gasses unless your goal is really control.

daniel wright

Or both.

John b

GO COAL

jim jones

Anyone with a brain wants a clean environment!

daniel wright

That includes conservatives.

Patriot41

Since our country has the most coal on the planet, we should be utilizing it as a natural resource for fuel. The coal industry has cleaned up the process of providing clean coal and it’s burning process, and it has been a blessing to this nation. We would be foolish not to use it.